The next morning, the palace at dawn was a sleeping beast. Its stone walls bore the golden kiss of morning light, but inside, shadows clung to the corridors like secrets. Servants padded about with their heads low, and guards blinked away the last vestiges of night as they changed posts.
He slipped in unnoticed, wrapped in the anonymity of routine. Painters were expected here, artists hired to preserve the grandeur of the royal chambers, to gild ceilings and immortalize noble faces. His pass allowed him into the north wing, but his footsteps turned toward the forgotten east tower.
That tower held the disused kitchens. Once grand, now hollowed by fire years ago and left for rot. But the tunnels beneath, those had not been sealed.
He had spent months mapping them. Hidden passages and old servant corridors had become his domain. Each brick had a memory; each echo, a whisper of escape routes and forgotten exits. He knew where to hide a dagger, how to bypass the guards, and where the wine would be stored during the Autumn Ball.
And now, it was time to prepare the fire.
He knelt beneath the old stone hearth, opening the panel he had pried loose last week. Inside: straw soaked in oil, tiny bottles of pitch, a wick running along a crevice of the wall. All it needed was a spark.
The plan was elegant. At the height of the celebration, a servant would knock a brazier "accidentally." A fire would bloom, brief but hot, throwing the great hall into panic. Guests would flee. Guards would scatter. And in the chaos, the king's goblet, already poisoned, would pass unnoticed to his lips.
He would die gasping, not from fire, but from venom.
And the painter? He would vanish through the tunnels beneath the hearth, slipping into the streets before the final scream.
But as he tested the wick, securing its placement with slow, methodical care, he paused. His fingers trembled.
It was not fear of killing. He had long since buried that hesitation beneath years of training and blood.
It was her.
He could still see her, glancing over her shoulder as she fled the corridor yesterday, her red hair loose like wildfire, those treacherous breasts bouncing in defiance of her royal blood. Her skin had felt like silk. Her gasp had felt like an offering.
What if she was at the ball?
No, she would be at the ball. She was the crown jewel of the kingdom. Eliza, the king's daughter. She would sit by her father's side. She would sip the same wine. She would be in the center of the storm.
He pressed his forehead against the cool stone.
"Get out of my head," he whispered.
But her name echoed instead.
Eliza.
He rose swiftly and shoved the stone back into place. He had prepared the fire. Now he needed only to place the poison and wait.
The ball was in four days.
And then, freedom.
He exited the tower, walking swiftly through the empty corridor, only to freeze near the corner.
A familiar voice. Laughter, light and warm.
Eliza.
She was speaking to someone, her maid, perhaps. He didn't see her, but the sound of her voice struck him like a blow to the gut. A memory of her bare chest, nipples stiffened from contact, pressed into him, filled his mind like fire licking across dry parchment.
He turned away quickly, slamming the library door behind him as if to seal himself in shadow.
He had to finish this.
No more distractions.
She was a royal. He was a killer.
The fire would do what he could not: erase her.